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For all you AI and Singularity geeks out there,
I found this article entitled "How to Build a Mind?" really interesting and intuitive. It is about a new theory that attempts to integrate recent findings from both neuroscience and deep learning. It explains how the hippocampus encodes recent episodic memories of life events, and then plays them back while we sleep in order to "train" the neocortex. This is very similar to the approach used by the folks at DeepMind to teach AlphaGo using a combination of supervised learning and reinforcement learning. In fact, Demis Hassabis, founder of DeepMind, was a co-author on the paper, along with neuroscientist Jay McClelland from Stanford - a former colleague and collaborator of mine during the earlier days of artificial neural networks while we were both at CMU, along with neural net pioneer Geoff Hinton, who is also now at Google. In fact, most of the smartest people I've ever worked with (literally, at least 10 people I can think of off the top of my head) now work at Google...
Which reminds me, earlier today I watched a really good video (embedded below) by Demis about DeepMind, AlphaGo and the future of AI. Demis describes in very accessible detail (starting at 28:15) the way AlphaGo works, and how it was trained (by playing against itself millions of times) to beat Lee Se-Dol, one of the world's top human Go players.
I predict that DeepMind's approach to the development of artificial general intelligence may actually work, and come to fruition in the next couple decades. That will really make things interesting.
I usually shy away from offering investment advice, but for those of you who haven't but can afford to, I recommend investing at least a little of your retirement savings in Google as an insurance policy against technological unemployment. When and if a Google AI steals all the jobs, you'll be glad you did...
--Dean
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f71RwCksAmI

All,
Here is an interesting article highlighting research that suggests silence (no not necessarily meditation, just quiet time) is good for the brain and cognition. Here are a couple passages I found most interesting:
A 2013 study [1] on mice published in the journal Brain, Structure and Function used differed types of noise and silence and monitored the effect the sound and silence had on the brains of the mice. The silence was intended to be the control in the study but what they found was surprising. The scientists discovered that when the mice were exposed to two hours of silence per day they developed new cells in the hippocampus. The hippocampus is a region of the brain associated with memory, emotion and learning.
The growth of new cells in the brain does not necessarily translate to tangible health benefits. However, in this instance, researcher Imke Kirste says that the cells appeared to become functioning neurons.
“We saw that silence is really helping the new generated cells to differentiate into neurons, and integrate into the system.”
In this sense silence can quite literally grow your brain.
The 2013 study referenced is [1]. Here is a quote from the abstract:
We used the standard noise level in the animal facility as baseline and
compared this condition to white noise, pup calls, and silence. In addition, as
patterned auditory stimulus without ethological relevance to mice we used piano
music by Mozart (KV 448). All stimuli were transposed to the frequency range of
C57BL/6 and hearing was objectified with acoustic evoked potentials....
[A]fter 7 days, only silence remained associated with
increased numbers of [hippocampal] cells. Compared to controls at this stage,
exposure to silence had generated significantly increased numbers of
[hippocampal] neurons.
and again quoting from the popular press article:
A study that was published in 2002 in Psychological Science (Vol. 13, No. 9) examined the effects that the relocation of Munich’s airport had on children’s health and cognition. Gary W. Evans, a professor of human ecology at Cornell University notes that children who are exposed to noise develop a stress response that causes them to ignore the noise. What is of interest is that these children not only ignored harmful stimuli they also ignored stimuli that they should be paying attention to such as speech.
“This study is among the strongest, probably the most definitive proof that noise – even at levels that do not produce any hearing damage – causes stress and is harmful to humans,” Evans says.
Apparently, silence may be golden when it comes to brain health.
--Dean
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[1] Brain Struct Funct. 2015 Mar;220(2):1221-8. doi: 10.1007/s00429-013-0679-3. Epub
2013 Dec 1.
Is silence golden? Effects of auditory stimuli and their absence on adult
hippocampal neurogenesis.
Kirste I(1), Nicola Z, Kronenberg G, Walker TL, Liu RC, Kempermann G.
Author information:
(1)CRTD, DFG Research Center for Regenerative Therapies Dresden, Fetscherstraße
105, 01307, Dresden, Germany.
We have previously hypothesized that the reason why physical activity increases
precursor cell proliferation in adult neurogenesis is that movement serves as
non-specific signal to evoke the alertness required to meet cognitive demands.
Thereby a pool of immature neurons is generated that are potentially recruitable
by subsequent cognitive stimuli. Along these lines, we here tested whether
auditory stimuli might exert a similar non-specific effect on adult neurogenesis
in mice. We used the standard noise level in the animal facility as baseline and
compared this condition to white noise, pup calls, and silence. In addition, as
patterned auditory stimulus without ethological relevance to mice we used piano
music by Mozart (KV 448). All stimuli were transposed to the frequency range of
C57BL/6 and hearing was objectified with acoustic evoked potentials. We found
that except for white noise all stimuli, including silence, increased precursor
cell proliferation (assessed 24 h after labeling with bromodeoxyuridine, BrdU).
This could be explained by significant increases in BrdU-labeled Sox2-positive
cells (type-1/2a). But after 7 days, only silence remained associated with
increased numbers of BrdU-labeled cells. Compared to controls at this stage,
exposure to silence had generated significantly increased numbers of
BrdU/NeuN-labeled neurons. Our results indicate that the unnatural absence of
auditory input as well as spectrotemporally rich albeit ethological irrelevant
stimuli activate precursor cells-in the case of silence also leading to greater
numbers of newborn immature neurons-whereas ambient and unstructured background
auditory stimuli do not.
PMCID: PMC4087081
PMID: 24292324